Training for a job that doesn't exist
Hundreds of thousands take part in federal programs to learn skills they hope will help them find work -- but instead they discover no one's hiring
Published: Monday, July 19, 2010 at 11:31 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, July 19, 2010 at 11:31 a.m.
NEW YORK -- In what was beginning to feel like a previous life, Israel Valle had earned $18 an hour as an executive assistant to a designer at a prominent fashion label. Now, he was jobless and struggling to find work. Updating his skills seemed like the ticket.
It was February 2009, and the city work force center in downtown Brooklyn was jammed with hundreds of people hungry for paychecks.
His caseworker urged him to take advantage of classes financed by the federal government, which had increased money for job training.
Upgrade your skills, she counseled. Then she could arrange job interviews.
For six weeks, Valle, 49, absorbed instruction in spreadsheets and word processing. He tinkered with his resume. But the interviews his caseworker eventually arranged were for low-wage jobs, and they were mobbed by desperate applicants. More than a year later, Valle remains among the record 6.8 million Americans who have been officially jobless for six months or longer. He recently applied for welfare.
"Training was fruitless," he said. "I'm not seeing the benefits. Training for what? No one's hiring."
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have enrolled in federally financed training programs in recent years, only to remain out of work. That has intensified skepticism about training as a curative for unemployment.
Even before the recession created the bleakest job market in more than a quarter-century, job training was already producing disappointing results. A study conducted for the Labor Department tracking the experience of 160,000 laid-off workers in 12 states between the middle of 2003 and 2005 -- a time of economic expansion -- found that those who went through training wound up earning little more than those who did not, even three and four years later.
Over the past 18 months, the Obama administration has embraced more promising approaches to training focused on faster-growing areas such as renewable energy and health care. But most money has been directed at the same sorts of programs that in past years have largely failed to steer laid-off workers toward new careers, say experts, and now the number of job openings is vastly outnumbered by people out of work.
Some accuse the administration of leaning on training to convey false reassurance that a fix is under way, while declining to create jobs en masse via public spending.
"It's such an ugly situation that job training can't solve it," said Ross Eisenbrey, a job training expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research institution in Washington, and a former commissioner of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. "When you have five people employed for every vacancy, you can train all the people you want and unfortunately only one-fifth of the people will get hired. Training doesn't create jobs."
Labor economists and work force development experts say the frustration that frequently results from job training reflects the dubious quality of many programs. Most last only a few months, providing general skills without conferring useful credentials in specialized fields.
Nationally, most job training is financed through the federal Workforce Investment Act, which was written in 1998 -- a time when hiring was extraordinarily robust. Then, simply teaching jobless people how to use computers and write resumes put them on a path to paychecks. Today, even highly skilled people with job tenures of two decades or more languish among the unemployed. Whole industries are being scaled down by automation, the shifting of work overseas, and the recession.
"A lot of the training programs that we have in this country were designed for a kind of quick turnaround economy, as opposed to the entrenched structural challenges of today," said Carl Van Horn, a labor economist and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. "It's like attacking a mountain with a toothpick. You take a policy that was designed for the best economy that we had since World War II and you lay it up against the economy that is the worst since World War II. It can't work."
The Obama administration argues that expanded job training has already delivered success. As part of the nearly $800 billion stimulus package begun last year, the administration increased grants sent to states for training programs devoted to laid-off workers by $1.4 billion for 2009 and 2010. Those funds came on top of $2.9 billion allocated through normal budget channels for grants in those two years.
Last year, the number of laid-off workers in job training reached 241,000, up from about 124,000 the year before, according to the Labor Department.
According to the Labor Department, 85 percent of laid-off workers who received training in 2007 and 2008 gained jobs within a year of completion. But the department does not track what percentage of them gained jobs in their fields of study and so far lacks any data for 2009, the first year of the Obama administration's expansion.
Experts harbor doubts about the reliability of Labor Department numbers, which are derived from reports by state agencies that collect data from community colleges and employment offices whose training funds are dependent upon reaching benchmarks. Twice the Labor Department had to correct the data it supplied for this article.
"The states play all sorts of games," said Eisenbrey, the Economic Policy Institute expert.
Nationally, prospective trainees are often steered into programs by counselors at community colleges and employment centers who lack awareness about which industries are hiring.
In the suburbs of Philadelphia, Eric Nelson left a job at a credit union call center in late 2004 to enroll at a state college.
There, the career services department helped him choose a course of study by consulting job growth projections. The result led to geographic information systems -- the mapping of data by place.
"It seemed like the thing to do," Nelson recalled, adding that professors and his guidance counselor assured him he would easily land an entry-level job paying $35,000 a year.
But when Nelson, 42, graduated with his bachelor's degree in May 2008, facing nearly $50,000 in student loan debt, he was horrified to discover that graduates greatly outnumbered jobs.
"I've had no offers at all," he said.
He is now living off his wife's wages as a librarian and contributions from his parents.
Even programs with successful track records tend to be focused on people who are easier to employ -- those with substantial skills and experience.
In late 2007, in the Minneapolis suburbs, Hennepin Technical College joined with local employers to help workers laid off from area factories secure new jobs.
The new program, WorkFast, aimed to quickly prepare laid-off workers for new jobs in medical devices and other growing areas of manufacturing.
Since the program began, some 80 percent of its roughly 250 graduates have secured jobs, according to Hennepin Tech -- among them David Gustafson.
Gustafson registered for the WorkFast program and added the mere fact of his enrollment to his resume. In February, just as he was drawing his final unemployment check, he got a job from a Swiss machine shop for $19 an hour.
A 2006 study prepared for the Labor Department found virtually no benefit for 8,000 randomly selected recipients who entered federally financed training programs in 2001 and 2002. In the year before their training, these people earned about $20,000 a year on average, according to the study. During the 15 months after their training, roughly 80 percent of these people were employed at some point, but their earnings in that period averaged about $16,000.
Among those who have this year completed training arranged by New York City's Workforce1 centers, half have found employment, according to the city.
But not Valle. As his 50th birthday approaches, he is living with his parents, unable to pay rent on an unemployment check.
After he completed classes, the first interview his caseworker arranged was at a Family Dollar store in Brooklyn. It paid $11 an hour. Still, he figured he was in no position to be choosy, so he went, assuming he was the only one being dispatched to the interview. When he got there, nearly 50 people were waiting in a stifling warehouse. Some had been there for more than two hours.
He waited an hour, standing because the crowd vastly exceeded the available chairs; because the applicants vastly exceeded the lone job on offer -- an equation not altered by his upgraded proficiency in Microsoft Word.
"It was crazy," he said. "I got so fed up that I walked out."
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